Genders & PowerStavros Karayiannis: When the Body Re-members
By Stavros Karayiannis, Fri 25 November 2016, in category Recordings
By Stavros Karayiannis, Fri 25 November 2016, in category Recordings
This is a dance performance that explores a space where orientalism and postcolonial subjectivity encounter Judith Butler’s theories of gender and Leo Bersani’s questions on masculinity. Informed by theoretical discourse, the costumes and choreography of this piece evoke rites of transformation and re-membering, crossing and transcending. The moves are powered by a paradox in the body’s experience of gender embodiment: while the performance of a certain identity yields a life-giving force, at the same time it yields to the sorrow of loss. The dancing body assembles memories that inflect gesture and compose an anxious but gratifying, even rewarding, sense of being en-gendered. Through its course, this dance performance attempts to weave into its material the numinous dimension of kinaesthetic experience while engaged with its theoretical and embodied dimensions.
